Short text not displaying in tabs

I'm having some problems with tabpanel in Google Chrome. I created a tabpanel with 26 tabs, one for each letter of the alphabet. I intend to use it to allow users to browse a grid using a phonebook-style browse-by-letter feature. The tabs look ok in firefox and IE, but in Chrome, they get screwed up (see below):

In firefox, however, things are just peachy:

This seems to only happen for tabs that have three or fewer letters in the title. If I change the tab titles to consist of more letters, the text shows up just fine.